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Goal Update

Week 3. Started strong, but got beaten up by circumstances at the end of the week. I'm learning to say no to stuff that doesn't matter or isn't helping me get closer to my goals right now. I'm changing the format a little bit this week to hopefully see how attitude can make a difference between doing good and doing great. Some how managed to put around 42 hours in this week.

Things that happened
- Work on the website as soon as I wake up instead of dealing with emails.Lesson: Tackle the work first.
- Put in some quality hours in the project by splitting my days with 2 hours of boxing three times this week.Lesson: Respecting my body.
- Added a ready-made component to deal with member levels(premium membership, etc).Lesson: Don't re-invent the wheel if you don't need to.
- Wrote a quick mock-up of a sales page with a payment form without expecting it to look great on the first draft.Lesson: Fail fast, iterate and improve.
- Worked on file uploads.Lesson: Do what's challenging ASAP.
- Said no to a birthday party and limited my time on facebook to one hour this week.Lesson: Didn't feel too bad for saying I had other priorities at this time. Know what is sucking out time in my day.- Forgot my cord to charge my laptop. I had a book on entrepreneurship and pod-casts so I listened to them instead of doing nothing.Lesson: Did what I could with what I had, but better not forget the essentials next time.
- Went to a party and limited myself to three beers.Lesson: Set boundaries and respect them.

Finally, on Wednesday I'll talk a bit about what the product is with a video. I guess you could call it a small business pitch. I don't think it's helpful to say I did X and Y if you guys can't relate to what exactly is being built. So stay tuned for that. And as always, thanks for the input and support.

Enjoying the vlog format. I feel it helps build a relationship with your audience, and can therefore benefit you by adding to that pressure of achieving your goals.

42 hours is damn impressive, and it shows that you really are seeing it as 'play', rather than grueling work. It's also good to see that you're reflecting on events that have happened over the week, summarizing them, and extracting lessons from each event; an extremely effective way to induce growth in yourself.

I advise testing the shit out of your product as you go. There may not be much scope for black-box and white-box testing at the moment, but be sure to carry out such tests as you go, for the testing scope will begin to exponentially increase as more and more features are added. Furthermore, you'll benefit from doing any regression tests whenever you make changes to already-existing features.

You're correct about design: functionality is key - worry about tweaking minor aesthetics once the back-end is solid.

This will apply for many things in the future, I imagine. StackOverflow is your best friend. Also, there are many pieces of software out there already that will aid you in developing your project. Look into different Database Management Systems and other shit that will make your life that little easier.

Also, I agree with not allocating x-amount of hours per day to work towards, but instead y-amount of hours per week. This way you'll be able to mix-and-match hours. You could have a day where you just feel like shit, burned-out, and want to eat carbs and watch a movie or two. Over the course of the next few days you'll be able to earn back those hours.

The screenshots look slick man, if that's what it looks like without putting big focus on UI/design etc. then I'm excited to see what it looks like after a couple of design passes.

I really like the format of your breakdown of key events and lessons learned as well, especially how you present the lessons in a broader sense. That's surely going to make it way easier to apply these lessons in the future and even see how they might be re-purposed for other situations.

Also people on here are crazy motivated with their hour goals, 42 hours in a week is solid. I know your aim was 8 a day but 6 is still massive. I wish I had the source but I remember reading somewhere we are only properly productive for a limited number of hours, and you 100% will have gotten that in, although as @Shaney96 says maybe the fact you say you are enjoying yourself, seeing it as play as opposed to "work" means that it might work differently.

I advise testing the shit out of your product as you go. There may not be much scope for black-box and white-box testing at the moment, but be sure to carry out such tests as you go, for the testing scope will begin to exponentially increase as more and more features are added. Furthermore, you'll benefit from doing any regression tests whenever you make changes to already-existing features.

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I am trying very hard to keep a test-driven approach to all of this. Can't say I'm always respecting writing the tests, but it does make such a big difference in the confidence I have with what is being delivered. Thanks for the reminder.

Also people on here are crazy motivated with their hour goals, 42 hours in a week is solid.

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Well @Jack, when I put in 4 hours in the morning, and then take three hours to go boxing, have lunch and come back to work out another couple of hours, I have found that I never put myself in a position where I'm beginning to hate what I do. That being said, it does involve being there from 7AM to about 7PM to account for the long break in the middle. I'm still seeing how I go about my days. Also noticed it doesn't bother me to spend time on this 7 days a week. It feels like I can take the hit for a 2 hour day if, as @Shaney96 commented, I'm not feeling a day out and would find it more productive to relax or do other activities.

I'm learning the value of being prepared, which is not the case for this video. I had in mind a 1 minute elevator pitch, but I ended up talking for five minutes. I'll see that I become more strict with conveying the idea and the main points to keep these videos short in the future.

Goal Update

Week 4. Times been going by real fast.

Got to work on billing this week. It's great because I got to learn a lot about working with concepts like subscriptions, cancellations, charges and all that jazz. There's a couple of things I hadn't considered due to inexperience, but I'm following best practices so it's been good.

I ended up adding a dashboard so that premium users can see their billing history, a FAQ and I have plans for some statistics in the future. Made sense to start it now.

A couple of indirect wins for the project this week:
1- Restrained myself to a beer and a couple of shots of gin at a party, gave me a fighting chance on the next day.
2- Started looking at optimizing my time when leaving the house. Trying to batch errands or meetings with people.
3- Related to 2, I'm being more assertive these days, told some girl on facebook I did not want to hang out with her(cause I didn't! haha) and I'm thinking win-win when it comes to scheduling time with friends if I know it's quite a commute away or something of the like. I'm done trying to please people. I still had about 10-20% of me making sure I was avoiding conflict by agreeing to stuff I wasn't going to particularly enjoy, but at this point it's over, gotta know what I want. It feels quite liberating to say no without making up some silly excuse.

Screenshots look good, I guess you're only going to reap bigger rewards keeping in mind different devices from this early stage.

What you were saying in the vlog about being able to do all-nighters when you have the right circumstances and drive was interesting, but be wary, I'm guessing you'll have to make those hours of missed sleep up at some point, and my money would be on hours in the early morning after a good rest being worth orders of magnitude more than extra hours on the end of a long day of work already.

You could do the occasional one for fun though I always enjoyed spending all night working on a project because it felt more like an event or notable action you might think back to rather than just another standard day of work, that and the fun physical effects sleep deprivation can bring.

I'm curious to know how many hours you got in as well, I'm assuming you smashed it like you have every week but it might still be worth noting the numbers down every week.

About 35 hours. Hence the reason I started looking at the way I schedule hang outs. Felt counter-productive to commute a total of two hours to meet someone and going back to the same location on another day doing another two hour commute. To add to that, on Sunday I worked 11 hours. So Saturday I was real short on my global weekly targer, I gave it my best shot though, so I didn't take it personally. Injustice is paying for the same mistakes twice , making the adjustments this week.

Goal Update

No video this week, I'm feeling productive so I want to put that time towards the project. A couple of things:

I experimented with early wake ups(Between 5 and 5:30AM). Found out I was losing a bit of gas towards 4PM, but that I easily made my time on the planned work. Ended up repeating the early waking four times out of five, happy with the results. I did snooze my alarm a couple of times from 5AM to 5:30AM, so I will stick with 5:30 and skip the snoozing, otherwise it kind of starts the day on the wrong foot.

I worked on an old clients website, they started doing content integration and asked for a couple of changes and support. That took out two solid days this week. I went back and forth between both projects, but that effectively split my progress in half.

Spending time on the other project made me re-evaluate some of the UX decisions I had gone with at the beginning, I want to make a couple of changes to the way the builder works, I want to do this. If it wasn't for this re-evaluation, I would essentially have an MVP that could be showed and tried by people.

Didn't get to deal with hosting solutions yet unfortunately.

I went out Saturday night and that practically killed my Sunday. Didn't drink too much, but I became physically tired for most of Sunday. In the future, I will do as much work as I can if I know that I won't be in a good position to do so on the next day as a pillow.

Went to a networking event on Thursday, started to investigate what these look like to connect with other folks.

Worked about 40 hours, 20 on project B and 20 on this one. But with the changes I want to make I'm basically losing about 15 so that's 5 for this one.

I'm giving myself two stars on this one. I'm going to switch Calendar Apps as I started losing myself in different tasks.

Went to a networking event on Thursday, started to investigate what these look like to connect with other folks.

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One of the best pieces of business advice I've received on this is "it's just as important who you sell to, as what you are selling". Screening for this I think is super important. You could be selling exactly the same service, and one client will be nickel-and-diming you, whereas another will drop twice the cash in your hand and say "done, do you have anything else?" or "can you also do this?" [spoken from some experience]. Really reflects in the networking too I hear. At some networking events, people are trying to sell stuff to you. At others, they ask "what can you do for me?". I guess it's all about getting in on the hot ones where the guys with money to throw are floating around.

The pinnacle though is throwing it yourself. You in the center, painting yourself as an authority in some area. I've heard reports from guys who did that before, and their monthly rakings were awesome.

What was the motivation for working on an old client's website? I assume both money and experience?

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He's my mentor. Older man that successfully runs bars and clubs. Talking with him is priceless. Women, work, family-life. I get this vibe that he's got the values I would look for if I was a woman. Hustler, confident, able to open up, able to handle conflicts, and so on... Last Wednesday he invited me to sample the food at his new venue, two babes were sitting close to us and they acted real nice around us. I could see how SMW works(I hadn't done shit and I was getting nice big smiles and eye contact).

I mean, if you are a wimp, you are a wimp. IF you are a wimp with a Ferrari, you are a wimp with a Ferrari. So, it might not be such a big deal to have status and material possessions, but it definitely generates opportunities, and knowing how to respond to them is what's it's all about. A man that can hold his own and that has stuff going for him is a big multiplicator in my mind right now. Gotta hustle on both ladders.

Thanks for the compliment. I keep telling myself that I have no more room for cowardice... I'm hungry and I will do it 500 times if it needs to happen.

This monday was Über productive. It's 7PM and I went on youtube and facebook for a cumulative total of three minutes. I looked at a changelist I submitted to the project and was surprised to see how much stuff I ended up moving around. I met a DJ at the boxing club and he told me he was working on his label 7 days a week 10 hours a day. I don't know if it's giving him results, but it was nice to talk to another hustler.https://s17.postimg.org/qd3g7ifj3/files.png